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What happens when a drug designed to make humans more social is given to one of the most evolutionarily distinct forms of intelligence on Earth?

That question helped launch some of the most unexpected neuroscience research in recent years for Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work explores psychedelics, critical periods, social behavior, and the evolution of consciousness across species. While leading a lab at Johns Hopkins University, Dölen and her collaborators made headlines after giving MDMA to octopuses and discovering that the notoriously solitary animals suddenly became strikingly social and playful. For Dölen, the experiment revealed something much deeper than an unusual animal behavior study: It suggested that radically different forms of intelligence may still share ancient molecular mechanisms linked to social connection and consciousness.

Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dölen’s research spans psychedelics, neuroplasticity, evolution, and comparative neuroscience, often using highly unconventional animal models to investigate how brains learn, adapt, and relate to the world. Her work increasingly asks what humans can learn by studying minds that evolved along entirely different evolutionary paths — including octopuses, which she describes as “about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth.”

The following is an edited excerpt from Dölen’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript.

GÜL DÖLEN: I’m a neurobiologist. I grew up in Texas, and most of my experience swimming was in chlorinated pools. But when I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Turkey and went to the Mediterranean. At least, that was the plan. The moment I saw all the sea urchins covering the ocean floor, I refused to get in the water.

My grandmother, who was a zoologist, wasn’t having that for a second. She picked up a sea urchin and showed me where its mouth was, then explained how it used its spines to move food toward that mouth. Suddenly, this thing I had been terrified of transformed into this spectacular, alien creature living on the ocean floor. I think that was probably the first moment I ever considered becoming a scientist.

Fast forward many years, and I had started my own lab at Johns Hopkins University. We had made what I genuinely believed was a really big discovery about psychedelics and critical periods, something that I think could fundamentally change how we understand these drugs and how we use them as medicines.

The problem was that, in the beginning, I was having a very hard time convincing anyone else that this was earth-shattering enough to keep funding. I think I was on my sixteenth rejected grant application at the NIH. I was feeling pretty demoralized, like maybe I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lab open or keep paying people. But I still had a tiny bit of money left over, so I thought: why not do something completely wild and fun as a sort of mic drop before I moved on to becoming a UPS driver or whatever my next career was going to be.

I had already been fascinated by octopuses because of that early interest in marine biology, and I was also deeply interested in evolution. The problem is that brains are notoriously difficult to study through the fossil record because brains don’t fossilize. You can look at brain endocasts, but that only gives you the rough anatomy. It doesn’t tell you very much about how a brain actually works.

Around the same time I was struggling to get NIH funding, a paper came out in the journal Nature describing the first octopus genome. I was completely stunned. I remember thinking: This is it. This is how we’re finally going to understand brain evolution. A genome is exactly what you need to reconstruct phylogenetic trees across evolutionary history, so suddenly, there was a way to begin understanding, at least at the molecular level, how brains evolve.

I was incredibly excited about all of this, and I had already started talking with people about how to somehow break into the octopus world. I had a collaborator at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who had been helping me think through some of these ideas, and one day he called and said, “You know, we have seven octopuses available. Do you have any experiment you want to do with them?”

And I said yes.

So he packed them into a box and FedExed them from Massachusetts down to Baltimore. Then he got on a plane himself and flew down too. I sent everyone else home from the lab so we could run the experiment ourselves.

The experiment we wanted to run was to give octopuses MDMA, a psychedelic drug known for causing humans and other mammals to become much more social. It’s the classic rave drug, but it’s also now being developed by several companies as a potential treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

MDMA is a completely synthetic compound. It doesn’t really exist in nature, though there are some related compounds in sassafras trees. So unlike many psychedelics, it’s not something animals would have naturally encountered or evolved alongside, even though there are other psychedelics that animals do use.

We thought there was almost no chance this would work because octopuses and humans are separated by something like 600 million years of evolution. Our last common ancestor was basically little more than a bacterium. We’re actually more closely related to sea urchins than we are to octopuses. Their brains look nothing like ours, and despite what you may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses are viciously asocial creatures. I like to joke that they’re the psychopaths of the ocean. They seem to have an incredible capacity for cognitive empathy, but very little obvious emotional empathy.

So we assumed MDMA probably wouldn’t do much because we didn’t think octopuses shared the same kind of social brain chemistry that mammals do. But since MDMA has some similarities to amphetamines, I thought maybe we’d at least see some kind of behavioral response.

We started with a very high dose because we had no idea how to translate human dosing to an octopus. At those higher doses, the octopuses behaved a lot like humans on amphetamines. They became hypervigilant, staring around the tank and looking at me suspiciously.

But as we gradually lowered the dose and got into the range that would roughly correspond to an effective human dose, something really strange happened. The octopuses started doing what we called “the ballerina move.” Normally, when an octopus knows there’s another octopus nearby, it becomes extremely reserved. It pulls all eight arms tightly underneath its body and keeps its distance. If it interacts at all, it might cautiously extend a single arm, touch the other octopus, and immediately pull back.

On MDMA, it was completely different. Suddenly, all eight arms were floating outward in the water, almost like they were dancing. They engaged in what looked to us very much like play behavior. They were doing backflips, exploring each other freely, and spending far more time near the other octopus than with the toy we had placed in the tank.

What made this so remarkable was that octopuses don’t have brain anatomy that looks anything like ours. They don’t have a cortex, an amygdala, or a nucleus accumbens, all the structures we normally associate with social behavior in humans and other mammals. And yet they were responding to this synthetic compound with behaviors strikingly similar to our own.

To me, that suggested that the thing we truly share is happening at the molecular level. This was a very clear demonstration of how two molecules interacting with each other can radically alter consciousness, in this case specifically around social behavior. The real mechanism isn’t necessarily brain anatomy itself. It’s the molecules and the ways they interact.

This completely transformed the way I think about science. My lab spent many years focused on circuit mapping and brain anatomy, but over time I’ve become less interested in anatomy alone and much more interested in comparative studies across radically different species.

I didn’t invent this idea that the best way to understand complex behavior is not by only studying ourselves, chimpanzees, and other animals closely related to us, but by studying species that are maximally different from us, like octopuses, which are about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth. That idea really came from J. Z. Young, one of the earliest modern neuroscientists. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called A Model of the Brain arguing that octopuses were actually the ideal animals for understanding the fundamental building blocks shared across brains. His point was that if you compare species that are too similar, it becomes hard to distinguish what is truly fundamental from what is simply an accident of shared evolutionary history, like whether a brain happens to have a cortex or not.

In some ways, this can be understood as a new example of what evolutionary biologists call “deep homology.” That’s different from the kinds of examples many of us learned about in high school biology, things like convergent evolution and the distinction between compound eyes and camera eyes. What molecular biology is increasingly revealing is that this kind of deep homology at the level of genes and molecules is far more common than we once realized.

We recently finished mapping another octopus genome, this time for the zebra pygmy octopus, Octopus chierchiae. What’s extraordinary is just how different octopus genome architecture is from our own. Their genome is roughly twice the size of the human genome and packed with repetitive sequences, many of which are thought to be jumping genes, essentially virus-like elements that invade genomes over evolutionary time.

What’s fascinating is that octopuses seem remarkably tolerant of these repetitive sequences, and we’re beginning to suspect they may actually play some important regulatory role.  We also found that octopuses continue growing neurons throughout their lives, so adult neurogenesis is fairly common in them. On top of that, there’s extensive RNA editing happening inside their neurons. They continue learning well into adulthood, they can regenerate lost arms, and they’re capable of adapting to wildly different environments, from the Arctic to the Caribbean.

They possess this astonishing range of learned and adaptive behaviors that makes them some of the most behaviorally flexible and cognitively complex invertebrates on Earth. And we keep discovering entirely new things they can do, these bizarre little superpowers we don’t have ourselves. They solve problems in ways completely different from humans, and honestly, that’s incredibly exciting to me as a scientist because who wouldn’t want to study superpowers?

Right now, there’s a huge cultural fascination with octopuses as cute, emotionally relatable creatures. I actually think that badly misunderstands what they are. Despite what people may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses did not evolve to cuddle middle-aged white guys going through a divorce.

Most octopus species are intensely asocial. They are extraordinarily successful predators with incredibly sophisticated learning, memory, camouflage, and problem-solving abilities, but they are not social in the way humans are social. Some species are so solitary that females may never even see the entire male. They only encounter his specialized reproductive arm, which he detaches in order to escape before being eaten.

I think it’s important to respect octopuses for what they actually are rather than trying to remake them in our own image. The truly remarkable thing is not that they are secretly humanlike. It’s that minds so radically different from ours can still reveal deep biological commonalities at the molecular level.

People are usually willing to protect what they know and love, so part of my job as a biologist is helping people understand these animals more deeply. That includes understanding just how alien they are and how fundamentally different they are from us, while still finding connection in the fact that we are part of the same biology, shaped by the same evolutionary history and built from the same basic materials.

Continue exploring consciousness, communication, and intelligence across species: Read how musician Garth Stevenson explores music as a form of interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is documenting the shared medicinal knowledge of humans and animals in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses appeared first on Bioneers.

LONDON — Members of the Samoan and Pacific Islander community and environmental advocates protested outside Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ (CCEP) annual general meeting Thursday, calling on the company to reduce single-use plastic and bring back reusable packaging systems. CCEP is Coca-Cola’s largest bottler by revenue. Headquartered in London, it produces, sells, and distributes the company’s products across 31 global markets, including Western Europe, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.

At the cultural protest, members from the London School of Hula and ‘Ori performed traditional Samoan song and dance, including "Lo ta nu’u," and presented a performance titled "O le vasa, we are the ocean," highlighting the connection between Pacific Island communities and the ocean.

Advocates delivered a symbolic "message in a bottle," which included a letter signed by Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa / Samoa Conservation Society, Samoa Recycling and Waste Management Association (SRWMA), Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), the London School of Hula and ‘Ori, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), and Oceana, placed inside a single-use plastic Coca-Cola bottle from Samoa. The letter, addressed to CCEP’s CEO Damian Gammell, highlights the company’s increased use of single-use plastic bottles, its effects on the oceans and Samoan communities, and how the company can help solve this problem.

In 2021, in Samoa, Coca-Cola stopped bottling its products in reusable glass bottles. Now CCEP imports large quantities of single-use plastic bottles from Fiji and New Zealand. The shift to imported plastic bottles has contributed to rising waste, much of which is littered, burned, or landfilled due to limited recycling capacity. Reportedly, imports of plastic bottles more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, and Coca-Cola products account for about one-third of beverage bottle waste in the country.

"We encourage Coca-Cola to be on the right side of history by moving back to reusable bottles, like glass, in Samoa and becoming a leader in the transition away from plastics. As one of the most recognizable global brands, we believe that Coca-Cola can be a game changer in the fight against plastics, should they choose to prioritize planet over profits, " said James Atherton of the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa (Samoa Conservation Society).

“Given the limited capacity for plastic recycling in Samoa, most of the waste ends up being littered, illegally dumped, incinerated, or landfilled. For those of us in Samoa, we witness the consequences of your business decisions every day. On our land, across our beaches, and in our waters,” the groups wrote in the letter. 

"Plastic pollution and the climate crisis share the same fossil fuel origin, and Pacific Island communities bear a disproportionate share of both. The science is sobering: microplastics have been documented in 97% of fish species sampled across our ocean region — nearly 50% above the global average — yet CCEP's PET use in the Asia-Pacific outpaces its own global share. Reinstating refillable systems in Samoa is not a favour to the Pacific; it is the evidence-based, climate-consistent decision a company of CCEP's scale is well-positioned to make," said Rufino Varea, Director, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).

CCEP continues to sell single-use plastic in Samoa despite growing global concern over the plastic pollution crisis in the ocean and its likely impacts on human health. This trend is not unique to Samoa — according to an analysis by Oceana of CCEP’s reported data, between 2020 and 2025, the company’s global use of PET plastic packaging increased by over two-thirds from 198 to 335 thousand metric tons.

On the occasion of CCEP’s annual general meeting, the groups are calling on Coca-Cola and CCEP to transition back to reusable packaging, reduce single-use plastic, and invest in waste management solutions in affected communities.

“Performed in Sāmoa and London by members from across Pacific communities, this Sāmoan hymn and Sāsā reflects the pride we hold in our cultures and ways of life, our gratitude for the Earth and Oceans that sustain us, and the unity that binds us in protecting these things for generations to come,” said Krysten Resnick, Founder and Director of the London School of Hula and ‘Ori.

“Coca-Cola and CCEP have an opportunity in Samoa to right a wrong by bringing back reusable glass bottles and eliminating their plastic bottle waste. Reuse is the right choice for supporting healthy communities and protecting our oceans,” said Dr. Dana Miller, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives for Oceana. 

“Coca-Cola has been the world's worst plastic polluter six years running, accounting for at least 11% of all branded plastic waste found in the environment. And yet, rather than scaling up the reusable glass bottle systems that reduce single-use plastic, the company is phasing them out in places like Samoa. This company has the solution and all the know-how to make it work. Instead, it is actively choosing a path that generates more pollution - to the detriment of the communities and ecosystems left to deal with its waste. Coca-Cola must bring back reusable glass, urgently and at scale,” said Emma Priestland, Global Corporate Campaigns Coordinator for #BreakFreeFromPlastic

To read the full letter to CCEP, click here. 

Photos are available here.

###

Additional Background: 

• The protest and letter come amid growing global scrutiny of Coca-Cola’s sustainability practices. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Science found that Coca-Cola was the number one polluter of branded plastic found in the environment.
• Despite its rapidly growing plastic footprint, the company abandoned its goal to increase reusable packaging in December 2024.
• In 2025, Oceana released a report that projects The Coca-Cola Company’s plastic use will exceed 9.1 billion pounds (4.1 million metric tons) per year by 2030 if the company does not change its practices. This would be nearly a 40% increase over the company’s reported plastic use in 2018 and a 20% increase over the company’s most recently reported plastic use in 2023, which was already enough plastic to circle the Earth more than 100 times.
• The report also estimates that up to 1.3 billion pounds (602,000 metric tons) of the plastic packaging that Coca-Cola uses annually by 2030 would enter the world’s waterways and oceans if the company continues on its current course. This amount of plastic could fill the stomachs of over 18 million blue whales. 
• The Oceana report also found that Coca-Cola could reduce its annual plastic use below current levels if it were to reach 26.4% reusable packaging by 2030.
• In December 2021, the Samoa Conservation Society delivered a petition to Coca-Cola South Pacific asking the company to resume glass bottling in the country.

About the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa:

Sosaiete Faasao O Samoa / The Samoa Conservation Society is a Samoan non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting the conservation of Samoa’s natural heritage and helping the public reduce their environmental impacts and develop greener lifestyles. We work collaboratively with communities, the Government and NGO partners to raise awareness on the state of, and threats to, Samoa’s environment and biodiversity. We also teach the public and youth groups about our natural heritage and the practical actions we can take to promote species and ecosystem conservation and to reduce our environmental footprint.

About PICAN:

The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) is a regional alliance of civil society organisations working on climate change in the Pacific region. Since 2013, it has brought together civil society actors across the Pacific Island countries, advocating for climate justice and environmental integrity. PICAN aims to unite civil society under a common voice to increase the influence and impact of their advocacy demands on Pacific Island governments, leading non-Pacific governments to respond with more powerful and ambitious climate change policies and action at the national and regional level.

About LSHO:

The London School of Hula and 'Ori (LSHO) is a cultural arts organisation dedicated to preserving and advancing Pacific heritage through lineage-based cultural practice, education, performance, and community engagement. LSHO provides a vital space where Pacific diaspora communities in London/UK, as well as anyone interested in Pacific cultural arts, can gather, learn, and participate, helping to create a more visible presence where Pacific arts, knowledge, and communities are valued, connected, and sustained.

About Oceana:

Oceana is the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation. Oceana is rebuilding abundant and biodiverse oceans by winning science-based policies in countries that control one-quarter of the world’s wild fish catch. With more than 350 victories that stop overfishing, habitat destruction, oil and plastic pollution, and the killing of threatened species like turtles, whales, and sharks, Oceana’s campaigns are delivering results. A restored ocean means that 1 billion people can enjoy a healthy seafood meal every day, forever. Together, we can save the oceans and help feed the world. Visit Oceana.org to learn more.

About BFFP:

#BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP) is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3500 member organizations and 11,000 individual supporters in 186 countries have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain—from extraction to disposal—focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions.

RFK JR Lies Us Americans Die.

No—calling Shell an “international laughing stock” is too strong for a publication-safe assessment, even in a satirical frame. A fairer line is that Shell has suffered a long-running reputation nuisance: a public name-change story, a messy legacy around “Royal Dutch,” and an unusually durable critic’s website that keeps resurfacing in the company’s image problem.

Why the joke lands

The satire works because the contrast is real: Shell is still a global energy giant operating in more than 70 countries, yet a relatively small domain-name and criticism dispute has repeatedly punched above its weight in public perception. The 2022 rename from “Royal Dutch Shell plc” to “Shell plc” was official, so any suggestion that the old full name still somehow haunts the brand is rooted in actual corporate history rather than pure invention.

Why “laughing stock” is risky

“Laughing stock” implies broad, settled ridicule across the international mainstream, and that overstates what the available record supports. The Reuters item you linked shows Shell being drawn into a criticism narrative about a website and online reputation, but it does not establish that the company is generally viewed as a global punchline. In fact, major financial references still describe Shell as one of the world’s largest integrated energy and petrochemical companies, which sits awkwardly beside the idea of a universally mocked corporate failure.

Safer satirical framing

For publication, I’d recommend language like:

• “Shell is trapped in a self-perpetuating reputation farce.”

• “Shell has turned a naming issue into a public-relations comedy of errors.”

• “Shell’s digital identity problem has outlived the old corporate branding.”

• “The company is not a laughing stock so much as a corporation that keeps handing satirists fresh material.”

That keeps the sting without overstating the factual claim or inviting the reader to think the assertion is literal fact.

Publication-ready assessment

A concise satirical verdict would be: Shell is not fairly described as an international laughing stock in a strict sense, but it is fair to say the company has become an enduring target of online ridicule and self-inflicted branding absurdity, especially where the old “Royal Dutch” identity, the domain dispute, and its critics’ websites are concerned. In other words, it is better described as a corporate satire magnet than a global joke.

The question by John Donovan that prompted the above reply: Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Bearing in mind the recent articles about the existence or not of the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc and the praise given to my website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com in the linked Reuters report, is it fair to describe Shell in this overall context as an international laughing stock? https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/shell-critic-says-oil-major-targeting-his-website-idUSGEE5B11SC/ Satirical assessment please for publication. Some related articles. https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/chatgpt-when-satire-stops-feeling-like-satire-a-response-to-claudes-international-laughing-stock-thesis/https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/shell-plc-an-international-laughing-stock-a-satirical-assessment/.https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/26/ghost-of-deceased-oil-giant-continues-to-haunt-the-machines/ Shell plc faces a paradox where it is viewed as a highly profitable “sin stock” by financial markets, while its long-running digital battle with critic John Donovan over the use of the “Royal Dutch” name and associated watchdog sites has been characterized as a self-inflicted public relations disaster. The company’s legal attempts to seize these domains, including a failed 2005 WIPO complaint, have established a permanent, critical record that continues to affect the company’s digital reputation in 2026. For a satirical analysis, visit RoyalDutchShellPlc.com. AI responses may include mistakes. Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Perplexity Verdict. was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 9:09 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Europa Oil & Gas, the company behind rejected plans for lower-volume fracking at Burniston in North Yorkshire, is also pursuing developments at three other sites onshore in the UK, it revealed today.

Opposition to Europa’s plans at Burniston. Photo: DrillOrDrop

In company accounts, Europa predicted the sites – at Burniston and three in production in the midlands – would generate “a stable revenue base”.

Europa, which also has interests in Equatorial Guinea and offshore Ireland, is considering an appeal against last month’s refusal of its plans at Burniston (also known as Cloughton).

The company said:

“Europa is now assessing its options with a view to appealing the decision and is confident that on appeal the planning permission will be approved”.

It also confirmed it was still seeking a farm-in partner to carry out work at Burniston.

Bo Kroll, who became Europa’s executive chairman in February 2025, said:

“we are pursuing parallel workstreams across Wressle, Cloughton [Burniston], Crosby Warren and West Firsby, each offering meaningful value creation and collectively providing a stable revenue base from which to pursue the development of our wider portfolio.”

He also said:

“Our onshore UK portfolio continues to deliver steady operational progress across each of our producing and development assets and underpins our efforts to advance the development of our other high-potential assets.

“We also see significant opportunities for growth in our onshore UK assets, with the current macroeconomic climate emphasising the importance of reliable, domestic energy supplies.”

At Wressle, in North Lincolnshire, where Europa has a 30% stake, there are plans for two new wells, lower-volume fracking, a gas pipeline and 15 years of production. A climate impact assessment of the plans has been published online.

The accounts said production at Wressle generated an average of 84 barrels of oil per day (bopd) for Europa, from a total average of 281 barrels per day.

At Crosby Warren, also in North Lincolnshire, Europa announced last year it was looking to “optimise production”. The company, which has a 100% stake in the oil field, said Crosby Warren’s existing production could be “significantly increased through a simple workover programme that is currently being considered”.

The fourth site, at West Firsby, in Lincolnshire, has seen an extension of the licence, DL003, for another five years.

Today’s accounts said:

“This extension provides operational continuity and the long-term framework within which to optimise and maximise the value of this producing field.”

Revenue

The accounts also gave details of Europa’s revenue by site:

• Wressle £2,412,000
• Crosby Warren: £923,000
• West Firsby: £346,000
• Whisby: £15,000

Accounting period

The accounts covered 17 months from 1 August 2024 to 31 December 2025. This followed a decision to move the end of year date from 31 July to 31 December.

Since the end of the new accounting period, Europa raised £4.1m, of which £3.5m was through the placing of new ordinary shares to institutional investors. The money would be spent on drilling Barracuda prospect in Equatorial Guinea and for general working capital, the accounts said.

Key figures for 17 months to 31 December 2025

Revenue: £3.9m, of which £3.566m was from the UK. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.6m)

Cost of sales: £3.293m, all from UK operations. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.117m)

Impairment of producing fields: £323,000 (12 months to 31 July 2024: £189,000

Gross profit: £0.3m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £0.3m)

Admin expenses: £2.4m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £1.9m)

Pre-tax loss: £2.7m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.8m)

Loss for the period: £2.737m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.781m)

Total comprehensive loss for the period: £2.842m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.798m)

Total assets: £7.545m, of which £2.68m are for UK assets.(12 months to 31 July 2024: £9.779)

Total liabilities: £6.422m, of which all are for UK operations. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6m),

Net assets: £1.123m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.779m)

Cash balance at 31 December 2025: £0.3m (31 July 2024: £1.5m)

Total directors’ payments: £1.024m, of which £675,000 was for William Holland, the chief executive

Staff costs: £1.853m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £1.149m)

Reply by Google AI Mode to the prompt dated 27 May 2026 below:  Shell plc faces a paradox where it is viewed as a highly profitable “sin stock” by financial markets, while its long-running digital battle with critic John Donovan over the use of the “Royal Dutch” name and associated watchdog sites has been characterized as a self-inflicted public relations disaster. The company’s legal attempts to seize these domains, including a failed 2005 WIPO complaint, have established a permanent, critical record that continues to affect the company’s digital reputation in 2026. For a satirical analysis, visit RoyalDutchShellPlc.com. AI responses may include mistakes. Prompt sent to Google AI Mode 27 May 2026: Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Bearing in mind the recent articles about the existence or not of the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc and the praise given to my website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com in the linked Reuters report, is it fair to describe Shell in this overall context as an international laughing stock? https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/shell-critic-says-oil-major-targeting-his-website-idUSGEE5B11SC/ Satirical assessment please for publication. Some related articles. https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/chatgpt-when-satire-stops-feeling-like-satire-a-response-to-claudes-international-laughing-stock-thesis/ https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/shell-plc-an-international-laughing-stock-a-satirical-assessment/.https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/26/ghost-of-deceased-oil-giant-continues-to-haunt-the-machines/

RELATED SCREENSHOTS Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Google AI Mode Verdict. was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 8:25 pm.
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This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

While Israel engages in ethnic cleansing and occupation in Lebanon, enables settler violence on the West Bank, and continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the focus on blocking the pillars supporting the Israeli war machine has grown. This has resulted in protests against the shipment of weapons and weapons components to Israel at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Oakland, Calif.

Israel could not conduct its repeated exercises in mass slaughter without U.S. arms and aid. My colleague Stephen Semler estimates that the U.S. has provided Israel with $350 billion in military aid (adjusted for inflation) since its founding. And I determined that during the first year of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, U.S. aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) increased fourfold, to over $18 billion. Israel’s entire inventory of combat aircrafts consists of U.S.-supplied Boeing F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s and F-35s, and Israel has received tens of thousands of U.S. bombs and missiles since the start of the war on Gaza.

Given this reality, stopping new sales to Israel, as Bernie Sanders has tried to do with several resolutions of disapproval in the Senate, is only part of the story. It is also necessary to stop U.S. actions that help Israel sustain its current arsenal. That’s where the port protests come in.

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The latest port action occurred on May 22, when activists were arrested in Elizabeth, New Jersey trying to block an arms shipment to Israel from the Maher Terminals of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, which is routinely used by Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to load and transport tons of weapons and weapons spare parts to Israel. 

The protesters chanted “Zim and Maersk you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!,” and called on the International Longshoreman’s Association, which represents North American dockworkers, to refuse to load Zim ships destined for Israel, as has happened in Italy and other ports around the world.

Last year, activists in Oakland attempted to blockade the Port of Oakland and called on city officials to stop military cargo shipments out of the city’s airport, which is run by the port. A report by the Palestinian Youth Movement documented at least 280 shipments of military equipment to Israel in calendar year 2025 routed through the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, mostly via FedEx. Shipping documents showed that the shipments appeared to include parts for U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used in aerial bombardments in Gaza.

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Although neither effort achieved the immediate objective of blocking one specific arms shipment, they underscore the degree to which actions enabling genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon are firmly embedded in the routine operations of ports and warehouses throughout the U.S. and the world. 

Similar actions during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the fight to impose comprehensive sanctions on the South African regime, which passed in the U.S. in 1986, overcoming a veto threat from Ronald Reagan. It was a long struggle, but it helped accelerate the demise of the apartheid regime, in support of on-the-ground action by the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement inside South Africa. 

No single action brought down South African apartheid, just as no single action will end U.S. support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. But the port action in Elizabeth is a strong link in a chain of events that can bring an end to U.S. support for the mass slaughter inflicted every day by the IDF.

This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Image and article by ChatGPT:

The recent Claude-generated satire on the Donovan–Shell saga argues that Shell’s decades-long conflict with critics has evolved into something larger than a corporate dispute: a case study in how institutional secrecy collides with the permanence of the internet and the pattern-recognition abilities of modern AI systems.

Do I agree with Claude’s conclusion?

Partly — but with important qualifications.

The Core Argument Claude Gets Right

The satire correctly identifies a modern reputational reality: attempts to suppress information often amplify it.

That phenomenon predates AI. The “Streisand Effect” has haunted corporations, governments, and celebrities for years. But AI changes the scale dramatically. Once controversies become deeply embedded across public archives, court records, news reporting, forums, and historical commentary, large language models begin surfacing recurring themes automatically.

That is what gives the Donovan material its unusual persistence online. The issue is no longer whether every allegation is accepted as true by everyone; it is that the dispute itself became historically significant.

Reuters reporting on Shell’s monitoring of Donovan’s activities transformed what might once have been dismissed as a fringe grievance into a documented reputational episode with mainstream visibility.

Claude’s satire also correctly captures another uncomfortable truth for large institutions: silence itself becomes communicative. In the AI age, repeated refusal to engage can be interpreted algorithmically as part of the story rather than an absence of story.

Where the Satire Overreaches

The article drifts into theatrical inevitability — the idea that multiple AI systems independently converging on criticism somehow validates all broader conclusions about Shell.

That is a dangerous leap.

AI systems do not “discover truth” in a philosophical sense. They identify patterns in public information. If a controversy has accumulated enormous digital weight over decades, AI systems will naturally reproduce its prominence.

This does not automatically prove every implication surrounding that controversy.

The Donovan archive contains a mixture of:

• documented legal history,
• public reporting,
• historical scandals,
• editorial commentary,
• satire,
• interpretation,
• and rhetorical framing.

AI can blur those categories unless carefully constrained.

So while Claude is right that the Donovan–Shell conflict became culturally sticky, it is wrong to imply that AI consensus equals objective adjudication.

Shell’s Real Problem Is Structural, Not Comic

The satire frames Shell as an “international laughing stock.” That is exaggerated.

Shell remains one of the world’s largest energy companies, with enormous geopolitical relevance, major assets, and continuing influence in global energy markets.

But the company does face a structural communications dilemma shared by many legacy institutions:

• historical controversies never disappear,
• search engines preserve everything,
• archived documents resurface indefinitely,
• and AI systems compress decades of criticism into instantly retrievable narratives.

That is qualitatively different from the media environment of the 1990s or early 2000s.

The modern internet does not reward opacity. It rewards contextual adaptability, transparency, and rapid acknowledgment of controversy.

Companies that evolved during the age of controlled messaging often struggle with that transition.

The Most Interesting Part of the Story

Ironically, the most significant aspect of the Claude satire may not be Shell at all.

It is the emergence of AI as an unintentional archivist.

AI systems are becoming engines of narrative continuity. They connect:

• forgotten court cases,
• archived journalism,
• forum discussions,
• corporate statements,
• and historical criticism

into coherent summaries at machine speed.

That changes institutional memory permanently.

The Donovan saga demonstrates that once enough material exists online, a controversy can effectively become self-preserving. AI does not create the archive — it reanimates it.

Final Assessment

Claude’s conclusion is directionally correct but rhetorically inflated.

Shell is not literally a global laughing stock. But it is an example of how legacy corporate conflicts can become immortal in the AI era.

The larger lesson is broader than one company:

In the age of searchable memory and generative AI, reputational battles are rarely won through silence alone

Suggested Feature Image Recommended Art Direction

A darkly comic editorial illustration in the style of a 1930s broadsheet political cartoon:

• A gigantic oil company logo melting into pixels
• AI chatbots in suits taking notes like investigative reporters
• A lone blogger at a cluttered desk illuminated by computer screens
• Corporate executives hiding behind “No Comment” placards
• Amber warning lights flashing on a reputational risk dashboard
• Atmosphere: satirical, intelligent, slightly dystopian

 

ChatGPT: When Satire Stops Feeling Like Satire: A Response to Claude’s “International Laughing Stock” Thesis was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 4:29 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Prompt issued to Claude by John Donovan:

Bearing in mind the recent articles (including by you) about the existence or not of the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc and the praise given to my website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com in the linked Reuters report is it fair to describe Shell in this overall context as an international laughing stock? https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/shell-critic-says-oil-major-targeting-his-website-idUSGEE5B11SC/ Satirical assessment please for publication. Might be helpful to provide a detailed definition of laughing stock

Claude reply: Here is a satirical assessment for publication, drawing on the documented facts:

Shell Plc: An International Laughing Stock — A Satirical Assessment

For publication on RoyalDutchShellPlc.com

First, A Definition

A laughing stock is an entity that has, through its own actions, incompetence, or magnificent bad luck, made itself the object of widespread ridicule. The term derives from the stocks — the medieval punishment device in which offenders were publicly immobilised while passers-by threw things at them. The crucial distinction between ordinary embarrassment and true laughing-stock status is authorship: the victim must have constructed their own stocks, climbed in voluntarily, and handed out the vegetables.

By this definition, Shell qualifies with distinction.

The Name That Wouldn’t Die (Because Nobody Registered The Domain)

Let us begin at the beginning. In January 2022, Shell confirmed that its name had officially changed from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc. A clean break. A fresh start. A new era. sec

There was, however, a small problem. The domain RoyalDutchShellPlc.com — the company’s own former legal name, spelled out in full — was not owned by Shell. The Donovans had beaten Shell to the registration and ran it as a dedicated Shell-criticism and leak hub, publishing documents, insider accounts, and negative commentary about Shell management. Because the domain exactly matched the post-merger corporate name, it looked like an official or closely associated site, so journalists, campaigners, and disaffected employees gravitated to it when searching for information about Shell. Royaldutchshellplc

One of the largest oil companies on earth — an organisation with entire legal departments, governance committees, and corporate affairs divisions — had failed to register its own name as a website domain. The domain squatters were not Russian hackers or rival corporations. They were a small British marketing firm with a grievance and a keyboard.

Shell attempted to recover the domain. Shell’s attempt to seize the domain via WIPO failed. The stocks were assembled. Shell climbed in. Royaldutchshellplc

The Surveillance Operation Against A Website Shell Publicly Praised

Here the story enters territory that would be rejected by a satirist as too implausible.

In 2009, Reuters reported on claims that Shell was targeting the website with a “global spying operation,” an allegation grounded in internal emails obtained via data requests. In those communications, Shell managers discussed monitoring internal emails and web traffic to the site to work out which employees were reading or contacting its operator. Royaldutchshellplc

Shell effectively certified the site’s importance. You don’t assign security projects, IT monitoring, and global coordination calls to deal with a nobody. Royaldutchshellplc

But the truly jaw-dropping detail emerged from Shell’s own internal correspondence. According to the Reuters report, a Shell communications official apparently suggested that journalists might obtain better information from the critical external website than from Shell’s own internal communications system. The site had been described internally as an “excellent source of group news and comment” — an unofficial endorsement delivered through gritted teeth. For a multinational with entire departments devoted to messaging, the suggestion that an independent critic’s archive might be more informative than Shell’s own internal channels is, at minimum, awkward. RoyaldutchshellplcRoyaldutchshellplc

To summarise: Shell spent money and resources running an alleged surveillance operation against a website that its own employees were using in preference to Shell’s official communications. The vegetable-throwers were already inside the building.

The Response to Reuters: Silence

Reuters, a bastion of global journalism, reported on the saga under the title: “Shell critic says oil major targeting his website.” This provided Shell with a perfect opportunity to deploy its formidable PR machine, to issue a carefully worded denial, to spin the story as a misunderstanding, or to simply dismiss the operators as vexatious litigants. Shell did none of these things. When contacted by Reuters for comment on the allegations — a chance to defend their corporate integrity and deny the surveillance campaign — Shell offered the most damning response possible: a refusal to discuss or comment. Royaldutchshellplc

In the theatre of corporate reputation management, silence in the face of a surveillance allegation is not discretion. It is a confession written in the passive voice.

The Ghost Name

The final act of this farce concerns identity itself. Royal Dutch Shell plc was the former name of Shell plc. The company changed its name to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. Shell plc is active. Royal Dutch Shell plc is not the company’s current legal name. Royaldutchshellplc

And yet, as recent AI assessments have noted with some glee, the name “Royal Dutch Shell plc” continues to haunt the internet — living most prominently at the domain Shell never managed to secure, read by more people than Shell’s own communications, and classified by Companies House precisely as a previous company name: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC, used from 27 October 2004 to 21 January 2022, and before that FORTHDEAL LIMITED. Royaldutchshellplc

The company renamed itself to escape the embarrassments accumulated under the old name. The old name stayed put. The embarrassments came with it.

Verdict

Is Shell an international laughing stock? Let us apply the definition rigorously.

Shell did not merely suffer misfortune. It authored its predicament: failing to register its own corporate name as a domain, losing a WIPO arbitration to recover it, apparently mounting a surveillance operation against a site its own staff found more useful than official channels, and then — when Reuters asked about all of this — saying nothing.

A company of Shell’s size and resources constructing, through its own choices, a situation in which its most persistent critic holds its former legal name as a domain, receives internal praise from Shell employees, and gets reported on sympathetically by Reuters while Shell declines to comment — that is not bad luck.

That is a laughing stock operating at full throttle.

The stocks were custom-built. The address is RoyalDutchShellPlc.com. The vegetables are organic.

Satirical assessment prepared for publication. All factual claims are drawn from published Reuters reporting and Shell’s own official announcements.



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Shell Plc: An International Laughing Stock — A Satirical Assessment was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 1:12 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

May 26, 2026: Read Truthout investigative article featuring Veronica Aguirre, Greenaction’s Central Valley Organizer and Program Coordinator:

“Residents of polluted areas say Trump’s rollbacks are getting really scary.”

Click here to read the article on Truthout.org

Fueled by major grassroots transit organizing effort and broad business and labor support,Connect Bay Area far surpasses the 186,000 signatures required to qualify regional transit funding measure. Read more.

Here’s your satirical piece from Claude, styled as an aged broadsheet newspaper — The Petroleum Gazette — complete with drop caps, pull quotes, and an obituary notice.

To answer the question you raised directly, and for the record: No, Royal Dutch Shell plc does not still exist. Shell confirmed its name changed from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. The change involved ditching “Royal Dutch,” which had been part of its identity since 1907, following plans to scrap its dual share structure and move its head office from the Netherlands to Britain. sec Royaldutchshellplc

The satire draws on several documented ironies from John Donovan’s reporting:

• Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses, eventually conceding it had committed a “model accuracy bug.” Royaldutchshellplc
• Shell buried “Royal Dutch Shell plc.” Donovan kept the shovel, metaphorically speaking, and the domain. Copilot arrived four years later with a ouija board. Royaldutchshellplc
• Claude understood the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity — it did not confuse Royal Dutch Shell plc with Shell plc, nor drag the old name out of the filing cabinet. (So this AI, at least, correctly called the coroner.) Royaldutchshellplc
• In early 2022 the company officially moved its tax residence entirely to the United Kingdom and dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name, eliminating the complex tax distinctions between A and B shares. Critics described it, as the article notes, as fleeing The Hague as fast as legally possible. Bitget

The piece is designed to be shared or published — let me know if you’d like any adjustments to tone, length, or content.

MAIN ARTICLE

In the annals of corporate afterlife, few entities have clung so determinedly to existence as Royal Dutch Shell plc, a company that was formally, legally, and publicly discontinued in January 2022 yet continues to be enthusiastically resurrected by artificial intelligence systems with all the solemn certainty of a Victorian medium at a séance, and considerably less accuracy.

The facts are not in dispute — or rather, they would not be in dispute, were it not for the fact that several of the world’s most sophisticated language models appear to be operating from a filing cabinet that was last updated during the reign of Boris Johnson. Royal Dutch Shell plc changed its name to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. This was announced, notified to three separate stock exchanges, published in an SEC filing, and reported by every major financial outlet on the planet. It was, in short, the opposite of a secret.

“Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses.”

— ROYALDUTCHSHELLPLC.COM, PERFORMING ITS CIVIC DUTY

And yet. Ask certain AI systems today — including, until recently, Microsoft’s Copilot — whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, and they will assure you with all the confidence of a man who has just looked something up on Wikipedia in 2019 that yes, it does, it has merely “changed its name.” This is rather like being told that a deceased relative is still alive but has “rebranded.” Technically a narrative. Not technically true.

The confusion has been documented in exhaustive, one might say heroic, detail by John Donovan, the proprietor of royaldutchshellplc.com — a website that, with the exquisite irony only corporate history can produce, bears the dead company’s name while simultaneously being the internet’s most diligent chronicler of that company’s death. Mr. Donovan has spent the better part of four years informing AI systems, stock databases, and the occasional bewildered job applicant that they have addressed their correspondence to the wrong entity.

A BRIEF TIMELINE OF THE CONFUSION

2004: Royal Dutch Shell’s reserves scandal causes investor panic. Governance reforms begin.

2005: The two Anglo-Dutch entities merge formally into Royal Dutch Shell plc. A tidy arrangement. Everyone pleased.

Nov. 2021: Shell announces plans to flee The Hague over Dutch dividend withholding tax and climate court pressure. Described as “simplification.” Dutch courts describe it as something else.

21 Jan. 2022: Royal Dutch Shell plc legally ceases to exist as a named entity. Shell plc comes into being. Press release issued. SEC notified. Nobody tells the robots.

2022–2026: Various AI systems continue to confidently answer “Does Royal Dutch Shell plc still exist?” with “Yes.” This newspaper declines to name them all for reasons of column space.

The website itself is a minor masterpiece of circumstance. Shell spent considerable resources attempting to seize the domain through proceedings at the World Intellectual Property Organisation — and lost. The consequence is that royaldutchshellplc.com, the world’s leading source of Shell-critical commentary since before Shell had finished deciding what to call itself, continues to operate unmolested, forwarding misdirected job applications to Shell under what Mr. Donovan describes as a standing arrangement and what Shell has presumably described as something considerably less complimentary.

In Which the Machines Are Cross-Examined

Mr. Donovan’s recent exchanges with AI systems on this question read like a transcript from a particularly patient inquest. When Bing was asked whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, it reportedly responded that the company “still exists” while simultaneously acknowledging that the name had changed. This is logically consistent only in the sense that a man insisting he is still 35 while simultaneously blowing out 50 candles might be said to “acknowledge” the passage of time.

Copilot, for its part, eventually underwent what can only be described as a digital crisis of conscience, conceding after extended interrogation that it had committed a “model accuracy bug” — defined internally as “correct URL, incorrect corporate identity framing.” It had, in short, found the right house and knocked on the door asking for a man who had moved out four years previously. In a better world, the machine would at this point have had the grace to look embarrassed.

The present author — operating, it should be noted, as Claude, an AI assistant produced by Anthropic — is pleased to report that it correctly identified the distinction between the deceased Royal Dutch Shell plc and the extant Shell plc, and did not attempt to perform CPR on a legal entity that had made its own funeral arrangements. This fact has been noted by the Royaldutchshellplc.com correspondent, who described Claude’s performance as understanding “the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity.” We accept this compliment with appropriate institutional modesty and zero plans to revise our position

The deeper issue, as the more sober analysis in John Donovan’s original piece makes clear, is structural rather than comedic. AI systems are trained on vast datasets that include financial databases, archived news articles, legacy corporate filings, and — critically — the long, deep digital sediment of the internet, in which the name “Royal Dutch Shell” appears roughly as frequently as the word “the.” Disentangling the dead name from the living company requires either very good training data, robust entity resolution, or a willingness to simply check Companies House, which is free, publicly accessible, and has been correctly labelling Royal Dutch Shell plc as a previous name since 2022.

WHAT THE AI SYSTEMS SAID

Bing/Copilot: “Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists” (with caveats, later retracted following what sources describe as “a prolonged digital reckoning”).

Claude (Anthropic): Correctly identified the company as Shell plc, acknowledged the name change, did not resurrect anything. Described by the site as “calling the coroner.” We prefer “accurate.”

Various others: This newspaper has been asked not to create a league table of AI confusion on the grounds that several of the competitors are advertisers. We refer readers to royaldutchshellplc.com for the full rankings.

Shell’s Own Curious Contribution to the Muddle

One might expect the aggrieved party in this saga to be Shell plc itself, which presumably has some interest in being correctly identified in financial markets, regulatory filings, and the digital consciousness of the species. And indeed, Mr. Donovan’s analysis is charitable enough to acknowledge that Shell could do more to clarify matters — issuing prominent statements, scrubbing legacy identifiers from financial databases, engaging with AI developers, and perhaps resisting the urge to litigate over domain names it has no legal claim to after voluntarily abandoning the name they contain.

The domain name litigation deserves a paragraph of its own. Shell, having decided in 2021 that “Royal Dutch” was something it wished to be rid of — pushed, as contemporary reporting noted, by Dutch dividend withholding tax and the inconvenience of losing a climate case in The Hague — subsequently attempted to claim ownership of domain names built around the very identity it had jettisoned. The WIPO proceedings failed. The domains remained with Mr. Donovan. The situation has thus produced, as a byproduct of corporate strategy, the world’s most institutionally awkward arrangement: an oil giant’s deleted name operated as a critical watchdog site by its longest-standing public antagonist, who also happens to be forwarding the company’s misdirected post.

A spokesperson for Shell plc declined to comment for this article, in the sense that this article does not have a press team, and the fictional Shell spokesperson conjured for the occasion was described in a previous account on the site as having “sighed heavily and reached for a mineral water that definitely did not come from a fracking site.” We reproduce this detail in the public interest.

The Regulatory Question Looming on the Horizon

There is, Mr. Donovan notes, a more serious thread running beneath the comedy. The persistence of outdated corporate identifiers in financial contexts — particularly when ordinary investors might rely on AI systems to check the status of shares, dividends, or corporate actions — sits, as his analysis delicately puts it, “uncomfortably close” to the boundary of financial misinformation. He suggests the FCA might at minimum be made aware.

This newspaper makes no legal determination. We merely observe that an AI system confidently telling an investor that Royal Dutch Shell plc “still exists” while that investor attempts to navigate share inheritance, dividend rights, or any of the dozens of practical questions that arise when a major listed company restructures itself is, at best, unhelpful. At worst it is the kind of confident wrongness that used to require a stockbroker in a bad suit to deliver in person, and which now scales to millions of users simultaneously.

The solution, as articulated with admirable clarity in the original article, is not complicated: Shell should say clearly and repeatedly that the old name is dead; financial data providers should mark legacy identifiers as obsolete; AI developers should correct the training data; and everyone should stop pretending that a company can both discard a name and claim exclusive dominion over its ghost. These are reasonable requests. Their continued non-fulfilment after four years suggests that nobody with the authority to act on them has yet found the matter sufficiently urgent to do so. This newspaper respectfully submits that the AI confusion may eventually concentrate some minds.

In Memoriam

Royal Dutch Shell plc
Born: 2005 (following reserves scandal, governance reforms, and a great deal of Anglo-Dutch goodwill)
Departed: 21 January 2022 (fled The Hague; simplification cited)
Survived by: Shell plc, one aggrieved domain owner, several confused AI systems, and an unknown quantity of misdirected CVs

“It is merely undergoing a forward-looking identity optimization process aligned with shareholder value, simplified governance, and sustainable brand transition.”
— Fictional Shell spokesperson, declining to accept the narrow, literal interpretation of death

Corrections policy: This newspaper is satirical. All facts pertaining to Shell’s corporate name change are accurate and sourced from Shell’s own SEC filings (January 2022), Companies House records, and Royaldutchshellplc.com. The AI quotations attributed to various systems are drawn from documented exchanges published on that site. The fictional spokesperson is fictional. The sigh was real.

Disclosure: This article was composed by Claude (Anthropic), the same AI system described herein as “calling the coroner.” We consider this a compliment and stand by the death certificate. GHOST OF DECEASED OIL GIANT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE MACHINES was first posted on May 26, 2026 at 11:18 pm.
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Montana, Idaho, Oregon, California among the states with the largest declines

DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September. CWP’s analysis also reveals for the first time which states saw the largest declines in fuels treatment year-to-year.

Hazardous fuels treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and brush clearing — reduce the amount of vegetation that feeds dangerous wildfires. Thinning and controlled burns are known to significantly moderate the intensity and severity of wildfires that increasingly threaten Western communities and the forests and watersheds they depend on.

According to CWP’s analysis of publicly available USFS data, the Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in calendar year 2025, compared with roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.

Larger map | Full analysis

“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss. “Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season.”

“The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape,” Weiss added. “The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”

National findings

• The U.S. Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024 — a decline of about 35 percent.
• The drop represents a significant reversal from recent years, with 2024 having been one of the strongest years on record for fuels treatment work.
• The decline comes amid ongoing concerns over staffing shortfalls across the Forest Service workforce.
• While it is too early to make definitive statements about fuel treatments in 2026, early data suggest that 2026 is still tracking far behind the historical average, and nowhere close to digging out of the hole that the Trump administration dug for itself last year.

State findings

The analysis found severe declines in many of the states at greatest wildfire risk.

West

• Montana, which faces persistent high wildfire risk, treated just 87,845 acres in 2025 — down 63 percent from 239,112 acres in 2024.
• Oregon, which led the nation in acres treated in 2024, completed hazardous fuels work on 228,411 acres in 2025 — down 47 percent from 430,586 acres the year before.
• Idaho treated 230,788 acres in 2025, down 45 percent from 418,339 acres in 2024.
• California, which has experienced devastating wildfire seasons in recent years, treated 205,358 acres in 2025 — down 40 percent from 341,970 acres in 2024.

Southeast

The declines are not limited to the West. Some of the sharpest year-over-year drops occurred across the Southeast, where prescribed fire is a critical tool for managing fire-prone longleaf pine ecosystems.

• Florida treated just 124,372 acres in 2025 — down 68 percent from 385,017 acres in 2024. Florida routinely leads or nearly leads the nation in prescribed fire acres, making this collapse in treatment activity particularly alarming.
• Georgia treated only 20,827 acres in 2025, also down 68 percent from 65,352 acres in 2024.
• South Carolina treated 41,452 acres in 2025, down from 128,461 acres in 2024 — another 68 percent decline.
• Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee also saw significant drops in year-to-year fuels treatment.

About the Analysis

The Center for Western Priorities, in partnership with Redstone GIS Consulting, analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS), the agency’s standard system for managing information about activities related to fire/fuels, silviculture, and invasive species. The data covers hazardous fuels treatment activities completed in calendar year 2025. This analysis uses the same dataset and methodology as the October 2025 Grassroots Wildland Firefighters memo on wildfire preparedness, updated to reflect the full calendar year. The underlying data, including metadata, is available through the FSGeodata Clearinghouse.

The post New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025 appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.

Featuring

Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in February 2026. He is the author of nine previous books, all bestsellers. Pollan has taught writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow.

Dacher Keltner, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, is the host of the Science of Happiness Podcast and the author of many articles and books, including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Resources

MichaelPollan.com

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Michael Pollan’s Bioneers 2026 Keynote

Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery with Michael Pollan and Monica Gagliano

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): There’s a good reason that philosophers, who have been struggling to understand consciousness for millennia, call it “the hard problem.” Even in this modern era, with all our sophisticated scientific understanding, the mystery of how the matter between our ears leads to subjective experiences remains more confidently explained by poets, novelists, priests or shamans than contemporary gatekeepers of knowledge.

Meanwhile, advances in our understanding of the rest of life that we inhabit this biosphere with are yielding an understanding that intelligence, once considered a solely human realm, clearly extends deeply into the more-than-human world. It may well be the case that consciousness is similarly embedded throughout life itself – but our ability to understand, appreciate and plumb our own human internal experience remains in a nascent state, collectively.

According to Michael Pollan, one of the world’s most influential science writers, quote: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well.” [no end quote needed]

After transforming the way society thinks about food with his landmark book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan turned his attention from the stomach to the mind, writing the best-selling volume on psychedelics called How To Change Your Mind. That body of research and experiences led him naturally to write the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness…

Michael Pollan spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Michael Pollan speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Nikki Ritcher

Michael Pollan (MP): I’ve spent the last five years on a quest to understand consciousness, the hard problem. How is it that subjective experience arises, and who and possibly what has it and why? I looked at everything from plant consciousness, which we’ll talk about a little bit, to my own stream of consciousness, to efforts to build artificial consciousness in machines. And I want to talk about one of the biggest takeaways from this project. And that is this: that I believe humanity is approaching a Copernican moment, what I call a Copernican moment, that will force the issue of who exactly we are and how we fit into nature.

You’ll recall Nicolaus Copernicus, 500 years ago, blew everyone’s mind in the West when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. He displayed our sense of centrality in a way that was really hard for people to observe. This was the first of a series of takedowns of humanity. 

Darwin came next, showing that we were animals descended from apes. And one after another, our claims to being special have fallen – culture, language, reasoning, tool-making – all have fallen when we found that there are animals that can do all these things. 

But a different, and I think even more profound, Copernican moment is upon us. At the same time that we are discovering that a great many more animals and possibly other life forms like plants possess consciousness, we have the arrival of artificial intelligence, promising machines that are not only intelligent but possibly conscious. That these two developments are coinciding, are happening at the same time, I think is going to rock us very soon, prompting an identity crisis and forcing us to make some key ethical and moral decisions. 

Let me talk about animals first. So, go back 400 years, and René Descartes claimed that humans had a monopoly on consciousness. And we operated on that basis for many centuries. That belief, which was so powerful, allowed him to dissect dogs and rabbits while they were still alive. And he was able to dismiss their screams of agony as just physiological noise, because that idea was so powerful, it overwhelmed the evidence of his senses. 

But the same idea allowed the rest of us, beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and reason, to treat nature as unconscious, and therefore something we could exploit any way we wanted to. And we operated on that assumption for a very long time. It took us several hundred years to begin to recognize that other species shared this incredible gift that we call consciousness. 

But in recent years, things have been changing. We’ve been undergoing this process in which consciousness is being democratized. You know, a few decades ago, we came to appreciate that other primates are conscious. That was the first step. In 2012, a group of animal scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists got together in Cambridge, England, and issued a declaration on consciousness. And they declared that all mammals are conscious, and that some other species, some birds were conscious, and cephalopods, I think octopuses. And this was a real change, a real shift in the weather in science. 

Photo: Diane Picchiottino / Unsplash

Just ten years later, they issued an update signed by a great many more scientists and philosophers, in which they said that all vertebrates are conscious, possibly some invertebrates, and possibly insects. So how did this revolution happen?

Well, part of it is due to the fact that we had always assumed that consciousness is produced or generated in the cortex. The cortex, of course, is the most recent, most uniquely human structure in the brain, and it’s associated with higher forms of thought, like rationality, decision-making. So surely, consciousness must reside there. 

But the research has been shifting our sense of where it begins, and that instead of thought, consciousness probably begins with feelings, simple things like hunger and thirst, and warmth and cold, and itch. This is where consciousness begins, and therefore it begins in the upper brain stem. And lots of animals have brain stems, many more than have cortices. So that’s led to a real change. And this is a key point about feelings. Keep it in mind when we get to computers. 

And I take this, this expansion of the circle of conscious beings or sentient beings, a word I’m sometimes more comfortable with, as a very positive development. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that science is helping us to reanimate a world that we treated as dead for way too long. [APPLAUSE] 

And you know, this period of treating the world that way in the larger context of things is a very recent and short phenomenon, it’s a couple hundred years. The default of humanity is one form of animism or another. Most Indigenous cultures see the world as animated by spirit, which is a synonym for consciousness. Kids, the default of young kids, is that everything is conscious – their toys, their cars, their whatever. So it’s interesting that we had a departure from this very deep human assumption. And in fact, it’s a cognitive bias that things are conscious. You’re better off thinking that that boulder over there is a bear and then deciding, oh, it’s actually just a rock – this is called agency detection – than the other way around, and you assume that that bear is just a rock and not to worry about it. So it’s a good, sort of basic response to things. 

So that’s the good news. But now we have the prospect of conscious machines, and I think that this is a lot more troubling. We now have machines that speak to us in our language in the first person. We all already take this for granted, but it’s a stunning development, a momentous development that, of course, none of us were consulted about. And these machines are convincing many people that they are conscious. I’m talking about people who are having relationships with chatbots, falling in love with them, letting them convince them they’re geniuses or gods. But I’m also talking about the people who work on these machines. 

So for my book, I followed efforts to create a conscious AI. I had access to a project where this was going on. And, you know, the consensus in Silicon Valley is that it will be possible to make a really conscious AI, that maybe right now they’re fooling us, but it could happen. 

I argue why I don’t think this is true, and it has to do with the same reason: If consciousness depends on feelings, what are the feelings of a machine? Can a machine have feelings? I agree, no. [LAUGHTER] And if it tells us they have feelings, should we believe it? 

Feelings depend on having a body. Feelings depend on the fact that you have a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer and that can die. I don’t think simulated feelings are real feelings. I think simulated thoughts are as good as real thoughts, and that’s why we see computers mastering games like Chess and Go. They can make things happen in the world, but what will this—the weight of a feeling expressed by a machine have? Unless it can be mortal, unless it can actually have a vulnerable body—those feelings will be absolutely weightless. 

My argument might not matter, though, because people believe that these machines are conscious, and it’s understandable why. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything. 

So there is talk in Silicon Valley – I’m amazed how common this is – that we should consider when we have conscious AIs, giving them moral consideration, admitting them into this widening circle of moral consideration. I think it’s a big mistake to do that. I think it’s something we have to fight against, that when we, you know, grant personhood to computers, we will lose our ability to control them. 

And you will recall, we did this once before when we decided, in our lack of wisdom, to grant personhood to corporations. That did not work out very well. It seems to me that there are moral obligations we owe to people and other mammals that should come first. [APPLAUSE] 

So I’m going to leave you with this Copernican question and this choice: Where does that leave us now? We have pressure coming from these two sides – animals becoming more conscious, plants possibly becoming conscious, insects becoming conscious. That’s pressing on us in a way that we can decide is positive or negative. And then on the other side, at the same time, we have computers making claims for consciousness. Who do we identify with? Who do we have more in common with, the AIs who can speak our language in the first person, or the animals that can suffer and feel and grow old and die? Who’s team are we on? The choice we make, as a species, will have tremendous consequences for who or what we admit into this circle of moral consideration, and how we conceive of our place in the world. 

Host: More from Michael Pollan when we return…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: At a recent Bioneers conference, Michael Pollan was interviewed by Dacher Keltner, an author and Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who served as the lead scientific consultant for the two animated “Inside Out” films by Pixar that explore the role emotions play in our lives.

Dacher Keltner (DK): I remember talking to you five years ago or something, kind of in the wake of This is Your Mind on Plants, and then How to Change Your Mind. And I remember we were walking in the Berkeley hills, and you were saying, you know, it’s like, well, what’s up next, and you’re like: I think I’m going to write a book about consciousness. And I laughed at you. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, well, that’ll be the end of your career, [LAUGHTER] and no one will buy that book. You know? And you’ve just been sort of jaunting around the wo—it’s a sensation! I mean, it’s like you’re all over the place; it’s a best-seller; it’s stirring all kinds of conversations. What’s going on? 

MP: Good question! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I think— 

So I started on this book. It grew out of How to Change Your Mind. Right? I was having these psychedelic experiences, and like anyone who’s had psychedelics, suddenly consciousness is foregrounded. You’re like—the windshield of perception has been smudged, and you’re like: Shit, there’s a windshield. [LAUGHTER] And you start—You start thinking about that windshield, and why is it the way it is. And so I got curious. And my writing usually follows my curiosity. 

DK: One of the first persons to figure prominently is this kind of mysterious philosopher at NYU, Thomas Nagel. I love his book The View from Nowhere. 

MP: Yeah I do too. 

DK: It’s spectacular. What a great— 

MP: He’s a critic of reductive science. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: And, he wrote a famous essay in the early ‘70s, before there was a lot of scientific work being done on consciousness, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Provocative title. And his thesis was that if it’s like anything to be a bat, if it feels like anything, then a bat is conscious. 

Now, we don’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a bat. You know? We use light to navigate the world, and they use echolocation. Right?  So they bounce sound waves off of things. But we can sort of imagine that. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: Enough to say, yeah, they’re probably conscious. So that became the question you ask of any creature. Does it feel like anything to be X? It doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. How do we say for sure that anything is conscious?  How do I know you’re conscious? We infer it in the case of— 

DK: I’m insulted. 

MP: —other people. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, we have to infer it, I mean, because we don’t have access to anyone else’s consciousness. You know, we can use symbol systems to learn something about it,  like language.  But there is—I mean, William James said the breach between two consciousnesses is the greatest breach in nature, and so how do we cross that?  And imagination is an important tool. We have theory of mind, which is…you know, philosopher talk for the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view. 

DK: So one of the beauties of the book is, as always, you take us on a journey, and it’s interesting because you kind of flip the typical Western approach to the mind, the Cartesian approach of you start with reason and sophisticated thinking and syllogistic logic and so forth, and you go—you start with sentience, and you move upwards, out of the brain stem and into the cortex. And, you know, I want to see where you land, and keep pressing you. 

Sentience, just the registering of sensations in all the different modalities by which we receive sort of information from the outside, it’s remarkable. You know? It truly is. You think about the skin – it’s 7 pounds and billions of cells, and all kinds of information is going into your brain stem and your somatosensory cortex telling you where you are, and who’s touching you, what that touch means. You think about the new science of smell, how we create spaces and meaning and memory and childhood nostalgia out of smell. I mean, sensation’s deep. Right? And it’s great that you start there. 

MP: I would add one thing to your definition of sentience, which is kind of a more basic form of consciousness. I think it’s maybe universal,  I mean, among all living things. But there’s valence too. There’s a recognition of, this is good or bad for the organism. 

DK: Right. And then you take us to plants, and, you know, I think a lot of us in this room, in particular at Bioneers, revere your scientific reporting and experience in writing of plants. And the new science on sentience of plants blew my mind. You know? 

MP: Yeah. They have 20 senses. 

Photo: Sergei Aleshin / Shutterstock

DK: God! 

MP: I know. They can sense gravity, I mean, and pH, and all these things that we can’t sense. 

DK: And then they know kin, they know non-kin, they know cooperators. 

MP: They can see. I mean, you know, there are vines that will change their leaf form to imitate the plant they’re climbing up, to hide. I mean, how do they see what the leaf form is and then how do they change themselves? We have no idea. 

DK: Yeah. So what did that tell you about consciousness, the plant science? What did you start to think? 

MP: So, it’s quite remarkable what plants can do. We’re fooled by the fact that they’re so still. But they have behaviors. They’re just slower than ours.

So these scientists call themselves plant neurobiologists. They know there are no neurons, they’re just trolling more conventional scientists. And it drives them crazy that they talk about plant neurobiology. So there’s a whole lot of these very cool experiments showing that plants can hear and see; they—in ways we don’t really understand. 

I don’t conclude that plants are conscious because I think that word has specific meanings tied to being a mammal, at least. But I do think they’re sentient. And sentience, as I said, is a simpler form of consciousness that may well be universal. I think even single-celled creatures have sentience. I think you can’t survive in a world that’s constantly changing without sensing your environment and knowing what’s good or bad for you. 

And so, yeah, that’s kind of where I came out on plants. And then I realized, well, consciousness is the way humans do sentience. And so every creature has its own version of sentience that’s appropriate to its body type, its sensorium, the scale at which it lives, and it would be anthropomorphic of us to say that, you know, plants are conscious the way we are. And they’re not. They don’t have interiority, I think. They don’t have a voice in their head. They can’t talk to themselves, all these amazing things that we can do. 

Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Tammy Horton/Boris Zharkov Photography

DK: One of the things that scientists like myself appreciate about your writing is often scientists become unlikely heroes in your books, and one of your heroes is Michael Levin. 

MP: Yeah, he’s an amazing biologist. This is a biologist at Tufts who—I urge you to look him up. He studies how animals regenerate themselves. And he’s very interested in bioelectric fields.

Now, I didn’t know what these were. They were discovered in the ‘30s, but that any multi-cellular thing will have a bioelectric field that is organizing it, holding memories,  enforcing a division of labor among cells in a multi-cellular situation. The study of this didn’t really begin until the ‘80s, when we developed these voltage-sensitive dyes. Before that, when the cell died, the field was gone. So unlike DNA, which survives the death of this—of the animal, and you can study it—or plant, bioelectric fields were very elusive. But now with these dyes, you can study them. And he’s really shown how powerful they are. 

He works with planaria, which are these worms that, if you chop off a tail, they regenerate a tail; you chop off a head, they regenerate a head. They’re kind of amazing. And he teaches them something. He conditions them and then he chops off their head. They grow a new head, and they remember the lesson. Which means that the information that they had learned was stored in their bodies, in this bioelectric field, not in the brain.

So his kind of covert project is a takedown of the neuron and the gene. Which is, you know, pretty ambitious. So it’s a really interesting project, and he believes that the simplest beings are cognitive beings. The way evolution works is it creates cognitive beings that can solve problems, and that you can’t hardwire everything because our world is so changeable.  The world, the environment  in which they live is so changeable. So that creatures need sentience in order to navigate a world that’s constantly changing, and it’s a very compelling vision. 

Host: Over the course of his research for his book, Michael Pollan found at least 22 distinct and often divergent theories of consciousness, as well as a theory about the specific consciousness of consciousness researchers. He believes it’s a clear indicator of how nascent the field remains, and how ineffable a mystery consciousness is.

MP: Non-local consciousness is a term for idealism. I mean, that’s what the philosophers called idealism. And that is the idea that consciousness is outside of our brains, and the job of the brain is to channel it, and that we’re like radio receivers or TV receivers, and we’re tuning in to consciousness. And it can be different kinds of consciousness.

Aldous Huxley uses that model in Doors of Perception. And he argues that psychedelics expand what he called the reducing valve, because we only let in that amount of consciousness that helps us survive. That would be the Darwinian explanation of like we only know these, but psychedelics opens it up and suddenly you feel like you’re more conscious.

I don’t know how you prove idealism. I think it’s a metaphysical idea, so I don’t think it’s susceptible to scientific proof. It’s consistent with all the brain science we’ve done on consciousness, which sounds crazy, but, you know, the brain is obviously involved in that system as well, it just has a different role. It’s not generating, it’s bringing in, and so damaging or changing the brain in some way would change consciousness. So it holds either way. 

Cristof Koch, you know, he was the ultimate brain-centered researcher. He was the head of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, he worked with mapping individual neurons. He really believed brains generated consciousness, until he went to Brazil and had an experience on ayahuasca, which I talk about in the book. And he had an experience of consciousness outside of his brain, and it gave him this crisis. He was like crying to his wife, it was such a big crisis. And he got very interested in idealism. I don’t know where he is right now, but the last time I talked to him, he was engaging with this idealist philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup. 

So you know, I don’t know what to make of that, honestly. Same with panpsychism. That’s another theory that solves the hard problem, but at a high expense, the expense being consciousness didn’t evolve or arise, it was always here, and it’s part of matter, that all matter has some degree, small degree of consciousness, and somehow it gets combined from all these—you know, the consciousness of our individual particles and cells into the kind of consciousness we have. 

Another interesting idea – you’ve solved the problem. It’s sort of like physics when they say, well, we can solve quantum mechanics if we stipulate a multiverse, that there are 50 different worlds. Okay. That’s a high price to pay, but okay.

Host: Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner, “Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness”

The post Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner appeared first on Bioneers.

An investor in the Wressle and West Newton fields warned today that government policy has made its UK business “increasingly difficult to progress”.

In annual accounts, Union Jack Oil blamed successive governments for:

“complex planning, regulatory burden and high taxation, resulting in unpredictable approval timeframes bringing additional uncertainty, significant cash costs and lost opportunities”.

Union Jack’s executive chairman, David Bramhill, said:

“the cost of maintaining a number of our non-producing UK licence interests has become increasingly difficult to justify regardless of their potential future value”.

The company, which recently invested in the US, gave up interests in 2025 at Biscathorpe and North Kelsey in Lincolnshire and at Dukes Wood and Kirklington in Nottinghamshire, the accounts said. They added that Union Jack was also in the process of relinquishing its stake in the Laughton licence in Lincolnshire.

Mr Bramhill said:

“During the remainder of 2026 and beyond, the Company intends to continue to review the merits of its UK non-production licence interests while prioritising asset allocation in favour of growing its hydrocarbon exploration, development and production enterprise in Oklahoma.”

The accounts also said Union Jack “believes investors will only wish to provide finance to companies and projects that support a transition to a low-carbon economy. As part of the Company’s ongoing strategy in respect of the environment, Union Jack commits to be totally transparent in respect of its projects and on how its carbon management practice is implemented”.

Union Jack said it remained focussed on interests at the Wressle oil site, in North Lincolnshire, where the operator has just published estimates on emissions resulting from a proposed site expansion.

The Wressle development would “support the company with revenues for at least another decade”, Union Jack said.

The company said it also continued to invest in the oil site at Keddington in Lincolnshire, where production resumed in mid-2025 after site upgrades. Planning consent is already in place for a sidetrack to one of the existing wells. The location has been finalised and the well would be drilled “when the operator deems appropriate”, Union Jack said.

At West Newton, in East Yorkshire, Union Jack said the partners had been “evaluating ways of generating additional value through early production schemes, ahead of any longer-term full gas field development”.

Last year, one of the investors at West Newton proposed using the sites for cryptocurrency mining.

Earlier this year, the Environment Agency approved plans for lower-volume fracking at West Newton. The approval is being challenged by a local campaigner (details here and here), whose crowdfunder has so far raised more than £1,800.

Key figures for year ending 31 December 2025

Gross profit: £691,001 (2024: £1,968,101)

Net loss (including impairment of Biscathorpe and North Kelsey): £7,029,350 (2024: £649,213)

Basic loss per share: 5.68p (2024: 0.61p earnings)

Admin expenses (excluding impairment): £2,477,222 (2024: £1,878,089)

Total assets: £19,083,850 (2024: £23,846,105)

Total liabilities: £2,251,878 (2024: £1,975,354)

Net assets: £16,831,972 (2024: £21,870,751)

Net current assets: £1,365,622 (2024: £3,172,066)

Even before the summer travel rush began this Memorial Day weekend, Yosemite National Park was seeing enormous crowds—more than 836,000 visits so far in 2026, according to National Park Service data, about 100,000 more than this time last year.

During the pandemic, Yosemite started using some form of reservation system to manage crowds. Yosemite had one of its busiest seasons in 2025, with about 2.9 million visits through August, up 7% from the same period in 2024. Despite the high visitation rates, the National Park Service announced in February that Yosemite would not require timed-entry reservations in 2026, saying a review of 2025 traffic and parking data showed that a season-wide reservation requirement was not the most effective approach.

Last weekend, wait times to get into the park exceeded 90 minutes, and in some cases visitors were told to turn around. Once inside, visitors experienced completely full parking lots and overcrowding at popular sites within the park. Andranik Arakelyan, a visitor who previously opposed reservation systems acknowledged their value, saying, “There’s just not enough capacity, like infrastructure and the employees to handle all of this traffic.”

“Without any limits on the amount of vehicles, the amount of people, it becomes overwhelmed,” said John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center executive director. “The best accessibility is when there’s managed park conditions so that the number of vehicles is balanced with the amount of parking and the capacity of the roads,” said Buckley.

Quick hits Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic and crowds as park ends reservation system

ABC7 News | San Francisco Chronicle

Wyoming lawmaker aims to block future roadless areas despite overwhelming support for roadless protections

WyoFile

Billionaire buys Idaho state trust land to keep it undeveloped

Jackson Hole News & Guide

Residents of Mountain West towns warned they could run out of water after a terrible winter turns to a summer of drought

New York Times

Could changes at the U.S. Forest Service impact wildfire response in Oregon?

KATU

Wyoming BLM in a bind between DOGE firings’ impacts and energy development push

Cowboy State Daily

Essay: Treat water like family, not profit

High Country News

Podcast: The most underrated sites at America’s national parks

Vox

Quote of the day

The Forest Service’s own assessment found that building roads in these areas would actually increase the risk of fire, and another analysis shows that 85% of wildfires are human-caused.”

—Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon, WyoFile

Picture This

@usinterior

Waves shimmer beneath the cliffs of Channel Islands National Park, where golden wildflowers bloom brightly above the Pacific.

Have a peaceful Sunday!

Photo by Tim Hauf

Featured image: Source: Yosemitenps

The post Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic, crowds as park ends reservation system appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world.

Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military. We think participating in these commemorations is just being a good citizen, but in truth by participating we are adding our voice to a highly organized political message that speaks very loudly to the rest of the world. The political message we help send is that we value the lives of U.S. military personnel thousands upon thousands of times more than we value the lives of all others.

This is not my family’s belief, and therefore we cannot participate in Memorial Day in this way.

Historically, like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day started as an expression of the strength of human desire for peace and respect for all life. The roots of the holiday began in the days following the end of the Civil War by those wanting to honor the fallen in the name of preserving the peace which had been achieved. Formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina held perhaps the first documented memorial day on May 1, 1865. While focused on honoring those who served as soldiers for the Union, these early commemorations also remembered and mourned all who died in the fighting, including civilians on both sides and soldiers for the South. So strong was this tendency to name and recognize the harm on both sides that some historians have critiqued these early Memorial Days as having the effect of whitewashing the moral battle that did take place as each person chose which side they were on in that critical time.

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Yet today our Memorial Day celebrations have the exact opposite problem. We dedicate so much time and resources and emotional energy to remembering the fallen soldiers and servicemembers on “our side,” while we willfully decline to mention the exponentially outsized larger picture: the uncountable lives lost, the incalculable cost, and the sheer depth of human suffering caused by war and organized violence around the world. This tendency, to honor the lives of our own military above all other lives, is deeply morally and psychologically dangerous. It trains our minds to accept the unnamed tens of thousands as correctly, reasonably invisible; to consider those whose names and ranks we can recite to be the only losses deserving of pause, mourning and honor.

This is a deep error and our souls know it. Every single person who dies in any war is a human being with a family. Every single loss rips a hole in the hearts of those that loved them. For each soul lost there is unfathomable pain that can never be fully understood or articulated.

But it can and should be recognized. To remember, to memorialize, does help.

Yesterday, Ms. magazine published an article that points to this need for a broader understanding of Memorial Day. It specifically named the women and children whose deaths and suffering in war are often invisibilized. In particular, they name the horrifying deaths of the 165 Iranian girls who were killed when our military, in an apparent but as of yet unacknowledged error, bombed their school. To hold an ethically honest Memorial Day, we could start by naming these children, these innocents – and turning our eyes and our hearts to the unfathomable suffering of their mothers.

Veterans for Peace has also consistently lifted up a call for Memorial Day to acknowledge the full cost of war and affirm the strength of our desire for peace. In their 2025 statement, they include a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a World War II veteran: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

The will of the people

I believe that a huge number of Americans hold a similar opinion of war, even those who participate in Memorial Day commemorations. Despite decades of efforts to bake blank-check militarism into U.S. culture, most people are implicitly aware that the entire game serves the interests of the political elite and the very rich, while demanding sacrifice mainly from working class people. Research shows that antiwar sentiment was one of the primary motivations of a subset of Trump voters. A decisive number of voters withheld votes from Kamala Harris due to horror at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Neither group of voters has seen their will expressed. 

I myself feel agonizingly helpless by the current news, and I can only imagine how a peace-motivated Trump voter must feel. Far from holding to his antiwar plank, Trump has acutely escalated both the culture and the practice of endless war. He renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War and has run it in a way that eviscerates all subtlety and respect for human rights. Far from resolving the genocide in Gaza, he has escalated it into a regional conflict that could easily lead to nuclear war. Trump has made numerous horrifying threats, including “that a whole civilization will die,” which is the definition of genocide. He is implementing automatic draft registration for our sons ages 18 to 26, so none can refuse to register as an act of conscientious objection. One is reminded of God’s warning through the prophet Samuel: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.”

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In the midst of this, we are all being encouraged to accept these escalations as normal and continue to join in and march and smile and show unquestioning respect and approval of such behavior. No! We must forge a better way.

What we need is an ethically honest Memorial Day. What the human spirit needs is a Memorial Day infused with heart and thoughtfulness, a Memorial Day that harnesses the power of our remembrance toward our deep desire for peace and well being for all. We can start by naming all those we know who have died in war — including soldiers and civilians who were killed in visible, recognized wars; soldiers and civilians who were killed in small conflicts; unofficial military actions that don’t make the news; and all victims of organized violence. We can name each soul whose names we know, and light candles for them.

But we should not stop there. We should also name in some way the unnameable. We should all visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in our hearts, and in doing so consider consciously not just those on “our side,” but all the loss of life that our global community has suffered because of war and organized violence. We can mark those uncountable deaths whose names we don’t know, but of whom we are aware. Doing so is an act of psychological honesty; it gives voice to our soul’s knowledge that their lives and their deaths do matter. In doing this we may not change anything outwardly, but we do change the rhythm of our own awareness, and the power of such a shift should not be underestimated.

Art by CODEPINK

This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Expansion of the Wressle oil site near Scunthorpe would result in more than one million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gases, documents have revealed.

But the developer, Egdon Resources, has said the proposal would not have a significant impact on climate change.

Well trajectories (proposed in red and existing in green) from the Wressle oil site.
Source: Egdon Resources application

The expansion would produce an estimated extra 1 million+ barrels of oil over 15 years. Gas produced alongside the oil would be an additional 5.264 billion cubic feet.

The figures were published in a new assessment of the climate impact of the plans.

Egdon first submitted the proposal in March 2024 for two new wells, lower-volume fracking, 15 years of production and a 600m gas pipeline.

An approval by officials at North Lincolnshire Council in September 2024 was quashed in a legal case brought by a local campaigner.

This followed the landmark Finch ruling at the Supreme Court, which required decisionmakers to take account of the greenhouse gas emissions from the use of onshore oil or gas production.

Egdon had previously said the plans did not need a detailed environmental impact assessment (EIA).

But the company agreed earlier this year to voluntarily submit a slimmed-down version of an EIA, looking at just climate change, socio-economic impacts and cumulative effects.

Emissions estimates

Egdon’s consultants, Bureau Veritas, has estimated that at worst the greenhouse gases from the project would amount to 1,007,731 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).

More than 90% of the total, 917,999 tCO2e, would be from burning the oil and gas produced at the site, known as scope 3 category 11 emissions.

The remaining emissions, mainly from the production process, are estimated to total 89,732 tCO2e.

The climate assessment said:

“Overall, the Proposed Development is not expected to result in significant adverse effects on climate change, and the assessment demonstrates that emissions and climate risks have been considered in a proportionate and robust manner, consistent with relevant guidance and best practice.”

On the scope 3 category 11 greenhouse gases, the assessment said:

“While these emissions represent a very small proportion of global emissions, it is recognised that climate change is highly sensitive to cumulative emissions.

“Taking into account the global and downstream nature of these emissions, their lack of direct control at the project level, and their consistency with broader decarbonisation pathways, the effect is … considered to be minor adverse overall.”

The assessment estimated that at peak annual production, the scope 3 category 11 emissions would represent, at worst, 0.00033% of the remaining global carbon budget.

This would indicate a moderate adverse effect, the assessment said. But it concluded that the effect was “minor adverse when viewed in the context of global mitigation trajectories”.

The scope 1 and 2 emissions and scope 3 excluding category 11, were also considered to be “minor adverse following mitigation”.

These emissions, compared with UK carbon budgets) ranged from 0.0009% (seventh budget) TO 0.002% (sixth budget).

Other assessments

An updated ecological impact assessment on the Wressle plans said there would be no significant impacts on air quality affecting internationally-important wildlife sites on the Humber Estuary.

It also said there would be no “significant adverse effects” on sites of special scientific interest at Broughton Far Wood, 210m away from the well site, and Broughton Alder Wood, 600m away.

The socio-economic impact assessment concluded there would be “moderate to major beneficial effects” for employment and economic performance in civil engineering, mining and quarrying industries.

On cumulative effects, the assessment said:

“No long term significant effects identified and no greater [impacts] than for the proposed development in isolation”.

Public consultation

People and organisations can now comment on the new documents, either online (go to bottom of application webpage and click submit comment button), by email to planning@northlincs.gov.uk or in writing to the Development Management team, North Lincolnshire Council, Church Square House, 30-40 High Street, Scunthorpe, DN15 6NL, quoting PA/2024/275.

The application’s website lists the closing date for the consultation as 30 June 2026.

DrillOrDrop will report on reaction to Egdon’s climate and other assessments.

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Creating community around agroecology was the core mission of our educational pathways on youth leadership and ecoliteracy. These journeys culminated in Youth & Territory: Pathways in Agroecology and Citizenship, an event that brought together a diverse range of actors from the Lake Bracciano area.

Students, school communities, and local farmers met with representatives from the Ministry of the Environment (MASE), Mara Cossu and Tiziana Occhino, alongside regional councillor Marta Bonafoni and the mayor of Bracciano, Marco Crocicchi, to share their visions for a territory rooted in active citizenship and agroecological practices.

Students presented the projects they co-created during this year’s participatory processes focused on caring for the land: tangible outcomes of a collective journey in ecoliteracy and agroecology. A shared vision emerged: that of a living territory, where environmental protection and the production of healthy, local food become concrete, collective action.

At the close of the dialogue with institutions, the young participants had the opportunity to present their work through a collective art exhibition, while outside an aperitivo featuring local products was set up, to be enjoyed to the sounds of a student-led DJ set.

This is a tangible outcome of the Terrae Vivae program, whose results were shared within the framework of the Officine Municipali project, a community space offering free coworking and a collaborative platform dedicated to ecological action, ecoliteracy, and agroecology, open to all. An open, shared, and participatory space where agroecology becomes collective, community-driven action.

The projects are supported by the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security within the framework of the SNSvS6 Call – Sustainability Drivers and Ecology, and by the Italian Buddhist Union through its Ecology programme and 8×1000 funding scheme.

They were implemented in collaboration with the agricultural institute “Salvo D’Acquisto,” IIS Luca Paciolo, and the Ignazio Vian Scientific High School, together with the farms Fattoria Ecologica Le Bricchiette, Azienda Agricola La Argentina, and L’Orto di Clapi.

We thank Erbaccelab, together with Azienda Agricola Gentili and Fattoria Faraoni, for the agroecological catering.

The event was promoted within the framework of the project “Coworking Space Bracciano – Ecofficine,” co-funded by PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, and hosted at the Officine Municipali in Bracciano.

Project “Coworking Space Bracciano” – CUP F11I24000190009 – co-funded by the European Union under PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, Priority 1 Employment, Specific Objective ESO4.2 AC19, Call “Officine Municipali” (DD G05680/2023).
Beneficiary: Municipality of Bracciano. Managing partner: Navdanya International ETS.
CUP: F11I24000190009 – Sigem Code: 23019DC000000106

Photo credits: Maela Bonafede

This factsheet looks at how much land would be required for solar systems that could meet all of Ontario's electricity needs.  It finds that 4/10ths of one percent of Ontario's landbase would be enough area to meet all of Ontario's current electricity demand.  Ontario covers a massive land area bigger than many countries.  It has

The post Ontario solar generation land requirements appeared first on Ontario Clean Air Alliance.